


Finders Keepers

by quicksilver_nightsky



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Amnesia, Archiving, Data Entry, M/M, Paperwork
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-08
Updated: 2019-04-08
Packaged: 2020-01-06 17:28:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18393023
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quicksilver_nightsky/pseuds/quicksilver_nightsky
Summary: Noctis is one of the survivors of the Insomnia Invasion. He's come to the Keycatrich Settlement with only one memory remaining: a man with glasses.A Digital Archivist with a secret will help him build a home.





	Finders Keepers

**Author's Note:**

> I promise I'm still writing even though it's not what y'all want me to update.doc

The hallways were tight, crowded on both sides by filing cabinets and stacked archive boxes full of folders and papers. The room he'd been directed to was marked out with a piece of paper taped to the door — the words 'DIGITAL ARCHIVIST' in messy block handwriting. 

He knocked on the foot and waited until a stressed voice yelled: "yeah, come in! It's open!" 

He could barely get the door open enough to squeeze in — there was a pile of boxes blocking the way. "Um. They sent me back here. From the front desk." 

"Of course they did." The speaker was a blond guy, his hair stuck up in wild directions. He could hardly be seen behind a stack of folders. He slid down a pair of thick black hipster glasses and massaged his eyes. "Sorry. I'm crabby today. Well, every day. Missing person?" 

"I'm looking for someone," he agreed. 

"Okay." He pushed the keyboard of his desktop computer away, and opened up a laptop in its place. "Let's do this." He announced, putting his glasses back on. "Name?" 

Noct shifted awkwardly. "Uh… I don't remember." 

The archivist slid his back glasses down his nose to look at him, frustrated. 

"Sorry." He shifted guiltily in place. 

The archivist sighed. "It's fine. What **do** you remember?" 

Noct sighed in relief. How many times had he been forced to explain himself in the last few days? That he'd forgotten basically _everything_ because of the invasion? That he barely knew his own name? 

"Male. Six foot or so. In his twenties. Glasses." He shifted again awkwardly. "Sorry. I know it's not much." 

"I've worked with less," the archivist said with a weak smile. He typed quickly into the laptop, peering through the lenses of his glasses at the screen. He bobbed his head toward the other side of the desk. "There's a chair somewhere under the stacks of folders. Move them anywhere but my outbox." 

Relieved, he found the chair and moved the stack of folders on top of a pile of boxes. The blond handed the laptop over the desk. "Control and d-pad to move between the profiles. Good luck." 

"Thanks." 

He clicked through each profile, looking at the picture attached and clicking away. As he waited for each new profile to load, he ended up watching the archivist at work. 

With each new folder, he worked the stapled Polaroid off with a staple remover, and placed it in the scanner. While it worked, he began painstakingly typing the hand-written documents. Then he printed the profile, re-stapled the photo to it, and put the finished folder in the outbox. 

It looked boring and painful. 

"Do you do this all day every day?" 

The blond looked up. "Say what?" He asked. 

He nodded his head toward the piles of profiles still waiting to be worked. "That. Peeling off the photos and typing up all the profiles and re-printing them." 

The pouty-shaped lips turned up at one side in a curl of a half-smile. "Yep. Welcome to the luxurious world of a digital archivist." He stapled another finished profile. "How's the search going?" 

He just sighed. "Fine, I guess," he said quietly. 

The archivist laughed softly. "Yeah. I feel that." He slid the latest profile in the outbox. "I'll let you know if I come across any new profiles that fit the description." 

Sliding his glasses back into place, he picked up another profile and began to work off the staples. 

Noct went back to flipping through the profiles, then sat back with a groan. "I think I've seen these ones before." 

"Yeah, it's looped," the archivist said. "Sorry." 

He felt despair grow in his chest. "Then… what am I supposed to do?" 

The blond - wow, he really needed to learn this guy's name - gave him a sympathetic look. "Most people come by once a week to check the latest profiles. We can't make the archive public — I mean, for anonymity issues too but mostly because we just don't have the server space. It's all any of us can do, really. Wait." 

Noct rested one arm on the edge of the table and leaned his face on a hand. He couldn't just wait. He was living, lost, with hardly any memories of himself, with no purpose, in the aftermath of an invasion that had reduced their city to rubble - and an imprisonment he only had the foggiest memories of. 

The only clue he had to his own identity, to the life he knew before, was the vague memory of the man in glasses. 

"Hey," the blond said quietly. "You gonna be okay?" 

He shrugged, pressing the right arrow on the keyboard over and over to flip through profiles he'd seen before. As if looking through them again would magically change them to the mystery man he was searching for. "I'm alive. That counts for something, right?" 

The archivist gave a soft huff of a laugh. "Well, that's a big kweking mood." 

Noct blinked, a niggling sense of familiarity tickling the back of his brain for a moment before it faded away. Kweking. There was something familiar about that. Like he'd heard it somewhere before in his lost memories. 

Then he shook his head and dismissed it. Maybe it was common slang, how was he supposed to _know_? 

But the blond was still talking. "...gotta find yourself something to do. Something to fill your time. And believe me there's _plenty_ to do." 

There was. A city destroyed, piles of corpses to try and identify, survivors to feed and house and keep track of. Farms to build and trade to forge with the [outer states] that had reluctantly taken them in. 

(They bitched about it. For decades Insomnia had turned away refugees and asylum seekers and now that they were the ones who needed help, they really had no choice but to accept them.) 

He sighed. "I haven't got a work assignment yet," he replied. "My application is in, but…" 

The blond gave another half-curl of a smile, gesturing around the room. "Well. You can tell how fast stuff gets done around here." 

Noct just nodded wearily. He got to his feet, his knee protesting at the weight after being sedentary for so long. "Well… thanks," he said quietly, shoving his hands into his pockets. "I guess I'll… see you again soon." 

The blond smiled at him. "Yeah okay. Servers update every night. Most people come Mondays." 

Noct winced. "Can I come another day instead? I'm not a big fan of crowds." 

He smiled. "Yeah. Come whenever you like." 

Noct turned and left the room, squeezing past the boxes again. He didn't hear the clack of the keyboard resuming until he was halfway down the hallway. 

*** 

He'd lost track of what day it was, living in the cramped dormitory with seven other guys who were almost as lost and purposeless as he was. Two families lived in the room next door, and the crying baby set all of the kids off. But until he had a job assignment, he couldn't request a different room. Some job assignments came with accomodation, especially the hard labour ones. 

Right now he was in the old Keycatrich Hospital — it had been partially destroyed in an attack before he was born, but they were living in what was close enough to being up to code it wasn't a _total_ safety risk. They could probably improve it, but anyone with something even _close_ to useful for construction was at work trying to build permanent accommodation. 

With his knee and lack of significant muscle, he doubted he'd be drafted into building — and he didn't remember any significant trade or crafting skills. 

He had the vaguest sensations of burning stir fry, so he doubted he'd be put in culinary. And it wasn't like there was many administration roles. 

So he'd be stuck here with nothing to do, for six knows how long. Mostly he napped until he couldn't sleep any longer and walked around the hospital halls until he was too worn out to go any further, and then the cycle started again. 

One of the men disappeared for the day. Then he came back, complaining about the digital archives and still not being able to locate his sister. How busy it had been and almost _none_ of them having anything close to luck. ("One person found a guy he thought might've been his wife's cousin but he wasn't even sure of that one.") 

Probably Monday, then. So when the next morning came around, he dredged himself up out of the bed and meandered his way towards the administration offices in the old school building that had been lazily patched up with tarps and broken plywood. 

The harried woman from the front counter glared at him. "You again?" 

He gave her an attempted smile. "I've come to check the new profiles." 

"But it's not Monday," she said irritably. 

"He said I could come in any day I like," Noct mumbled. 

She sighed in irritation. "But I don't have anything set up today! You'll have to go back and talk to him yourself." 

"That's fine. I don't mind." 

She huffed and unlocked the door to let him through to the corridors. The stacked boxes seemed to have multiplied without having the chance to shrink. 

The door to the digital archives was firmly closed, and when he knocked, he got a much less impatient: "Come in~!" 

He poked his head in. "Hey. It's me. Uh… wait, you probably don't remember. I came in last week looking for…" 

"Male, glasses, early-to-mid twenties, six foot or so. I remember. Come in." He gestured to the spare chair that was once again stacked up with folders. 

Noct found another place to put them, while the blond pulled the laptop off a charging cord and began to type in. Then he turned it around and gave Noct a smile. "Good luck. Hope you find him." 

"Any chance of that?" He grumbled, taking the laptop and setting it on the edge of the desk on top of some folders. 

"Oh, there's always a chance," the blond said optimistically. Then he grabbed up another stack of piles and opened them up. Then his expression fell. 

"What's up?" 

"This Libertus guy has the _worst_ handwriting. I hate filling his profiles." With a tired sigh, he pushed his glasses up into his hair to rub his eyes. 

Noct gave him a sympathetic look, and started tapping through the profiles. Nothing new. Vague faces, but nobody familiar. He sighed and closed the laptop. 

"No luck?" In contrast to his rather sunny greeting, he sounded as crabby as he did the first time they meant. 

"No." He sighed. "Thank you, though." 

He grunted and held out a profile. "Does this look like an 's' or an 'x' to you?" 

Noct leaned over to look over the thing in question. He paused with a hum. "Oh. They're Galahdian. It's a c." 

"A _c_?!" Prompto echoed in disbelief. "That looks nothing like a c!" 

Noct looked at the letter again. ᔦ. "Yeah. It's an old calligraphy from Galahd that still slips into their handwriting these days. That's a C. Iris Ami **ci** tia." He blinked. There was _something_ niggling in his head as he read that name. He had a flash of a cat, running through some gardens. 

With a groan, he rubbed his forehead, until the feeling disappeared. 

"You okay?" The blond asked, looking at him in concern over the top of his glasses. 

"Yeah… I think I had a cat named Iris once, or something." He handed the profile back to him. Reluctantly, he got back to his feet. "Well. Better get out of your hair. See you next week?" 

The blond tilted his head at him, much like a curious puppy. "Hey… you got a work assignment yet?" 

He shook his head. "No. They'll let me know. I could go to the assignment office every day like the other guys but…" 

The archivist gave an understanding smile. "Crowds. Yeah. I get you." He watched him for a long moment, then held up a finger. "Hold on a sec, yeah?" 

Confused, Noct stood there and waited. The blond printed something, then found a pen under the piles on his desk to sign on the page. "Here. If you want… take this to the assignment office. I have an assignment open for an assistant, and I'm happy to dump all of the Libertus forms on you." 

He took the page in confusion. It was a work order, signed by… Prompto Argentum. A headache sharpened in his temple, but he managed a smile. "Thanks…" 

"I know it's not fun, though. Feel free to tear it up if you don't wanna work here. I won't be offended." 

"No," Noct said. There was something like longing in his chest. For purpose? Or for something else? He couldn't say. "I'll take it. Thanks." 

The blond - Prompto, he had to assume, smiled and nodded. "Good. See you tomorrow." 

He frowned. "Tomorrow?" 

Prompto chuckled softly — more like a giggle than a chuckle really. "Well, you can start today if you really want to. I don't mind either way." He gave one of his lopsided smiles. "Course, it might take them all day to process you anyway." 

"Well…" Noct shrugged. "I'll definitely see you tomorrow, either way. Later, Prom." 

A faint line puckered between the fair blond eyebrows, before it smoothed out. "Yeah. Later dude." 


End file.
